How to explain DevOps to your mom

These are the slides used in my #devone (www.devone.at) keynote presentation:

DevOps is one of the most abused and overrated marketing terms in the last years! That’s not an alternative fact! It’s just Andi’s opinion! Yet - it is a very real thing that allowed many software companies to transform the way they think about software engineering. DevOps can mean something totally different thought depending on who you are and what type of business your company is doing. To clarify things, Andi gives us insights on how he explains the benefits to “DevOps Newbies” and how software companies around the world implement it in their own ways. Andi will answer: What does it really mean for developers, testers and operators? What will change? How does Facebook deploy twice a day without big issues? How does DevOps work in financial, government or healthcare where you have tight regulations? Does it mean Devs are responsible for Ops? Does it only work in the cloud? Or can we apply it to “old fashioned” on premise software as well? Learn for yourself and make up your own mind on whether DevOps is just a marketing term or something that can benefit you!

Here is an analogy for Waterfall as if you were explaining it to a family member or friend who was not technical. Remember back in the day we used to have a camera and would take it to an occasions. If we did not use all the film, a month later, we would take more pictures, and finally send the pictures to be developed.

Then the pictures would be developed and come back to us and we would not be happy with a picture we were waiting for, because something was not right, it was not a good picture. And this felt frustrating.

The analogy to Waterfall: Putting many features into a single release Ship it to some other entity who does quality control Final product comes back very late -> hard to remember which features / photos we created, and then often we realize its not what we wanted Frustrating

Here is an analogy of the new way of delivering software – continuous, in small batches with changes made immediately to bring better results for the user and the experience.

Using my girlfriend on a trip and a photo in continuous delivery:

The picture is received one at a time Quality control and optimization is in her own hands (thanks to software that is “part of the delivery chain” (the photo application software on her iPhone) She controls what to push into production -> post it on Instagram / Facebook She wants to make her users (friends & family) happy – she is hoping for LIKES! If she gets dislikes she can remove an image. If she gets comments she can take another picture and deploy it within seconds -> that is Continuous User Driven Innovation

She has the tools and the power to deliver, and she can quickly take in feedback and redeploy.

This is where I then start talking about our own transformation … - BUT NOT TODAY!

TODAY I want to start with a big THANK YOU

to a lot of people out there that actually allow me to do my job in a much easier way by sharing stories with me

We also shared our story on stage at PERFORM – in case you haven’t seen it

Which brought me personally and many others of our labs to speak at different events …

Just last week I made it to DevOps Days Toronto and we got some phenomenal feedback from the audience

And you can see that people are clearly impressed

Another big THANK YOU goes to Helmut. I know – you in Linz don’t think the UFO is all that spectacular any longer. But believe me – it is a BIG HIG around the world

Andy built his own version of the UFO – doesn’t like like a UFO any longer – but he basically uses it to visualize his the status of his different projects

Looks pretty sweet when everything is green 

And the folks in Toronto also liked it  - and came up with some new ideas

ALL OF THIS – our own transformation story as well as the UFO which visualizes our Cultural Transformation - opened up a lot of conversations with customers and prospects that are all about to go through the same transformation – and they TRUST US because we have gone through the same transformation

DevOps has been and still is a HOT TOPIC around the globe!

Image from http://roflol.in/earth-then-now-nasa/

Especially now within so called “Enterprise” companies

The reason why DevOps is such a hot topic for the Enterprise is because of the Natural Born DevOps companies. It all started with these so called “Web Scale IT” companies

We also often refer to these companies as Unicorns. But it is not just the Ubers of the world ….

We have an explosion of Unicorns in the last couple of years ….

And more are yet to come and disrupt traditional industries

Banking is one example where a bank that used to cover many different areas – some more profitable – some less profitable – are seeing that these unicorns are eating away their “golden nuggets”

This is why we see a lot of traditional companies trying to rethink on who they are – even traditional “enterprise” companies

Some are trying it by just mimicking others …

The real approach though is that once in a while ….

The lessons learned from DevOps started with several stories we heard – for instance ….

When do you think this quote was made public?

Amazon was also famous for their quote on putting developers in charge by “You Build it, You Run it!”

I was in the fortunate situation to meet Goranka Bjedov, Performance Engineer at Facebook – she shared a lot of stories with me while I met her at WOPR this year. If you want to learn more I recommend listening in to our podcasts with her

You get assigned to a project. You will not be able to pick the product or technology that you are most familiar with but something that is totally new for you. With that the learning curve is much better. You will Fix well known bugs and work on support tickets. This allows you to get familiar with the process at Facebook and you also get to know the teams.

Move Fast and Break Early! Stop working on things that don’t matter Quality of Pipeline takes away the fear of code commit

Developers have a Push Karma which can go down if they push something bad! Every dev starts with 4 stars - https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/release-engineering-and-push-karma-chuck-rossi/10150660826788920/

Google Web Server Team used to be the “dumping ground of bad code” – until they invested in automated testing

DevOps: Dev operates new projects until proven stable in production. Then hands it over to Ops!

Here is why our customers choose Dynatrace as a “DevOps Enabler”

The AppMon Personal License has been a key enabler of success in spreading the word about dynatrace to new accounts but also “land and expand” in existing accounts While these logos are by far not complete – they represent a couple of companies I recently worked with that use the trial internally Two I want to point out particularly because I like the two stories #1: Sentry: EVERY developer in their onboarding training gets Dynatrace AppMon training including a Personal License. Code changes have to be “Dynatrace Validated” #2: MasterCard: they have been a customer in the past – but – the trial opened up a huge opportunity with MasterCard in China which would have not been possible without the Trial -> tell story!

We also had a lot of people sending in their PurePaths through the Personal License Program – here is my most favorite problem pattern that we detect in about 70% of the PurePaths we get sent in

Great to see that a lot of these auto-detection features made it into the product – which means that more people can benefit from this “Artificial Intelligence”. This used to be a competitive advantage for a while but in the meantime our competition also offers some basic auto-detection of problem patterns.

Once you know how your app is exercised in PRD, you need to be able to feed back to QA and dev the proper distribution of PERFORMANCE they should be shooting for…. The left is a picture of one of our high volume apps during peak (*explain the performance buckets here and how they work*).

You can feed them (QA DEV) this picture as an expectation as to how the app should perform under large load. You can use this a barometer and judge QA load tests against.

As you can see on the right – there is a much higher mount of yellow transactions making up

Maybe mention that there’s a 3rd bucketizing and tease te next webinar for UEM

The next slides show a scenario that happened in our organization. This dashboard is used by our marketing and business teams to see how well frequented our website is (total numbers in top chart), how user experience plays out (top chart with green/yellow/red) and how many people sign up for our free trial offering (conversion rate)

May 1st was a push of a new release and a marketing campaign started that promoted these features and tried to get people to sign up Seems everything was working as expected

Day 2 started good but we also saw that slower web site performance (due to the heavy load) was impacting our end user experience and also conversion rate

The Dev Team provided a hotfix to make the sign up for faster #1: It got deployed around noon #2: Fix had negative impact as it broke the whole website due to a javascript problem on certain browsers #3: problem was immediately visible to both business (drop in conversion) and dev (they looked at the reported JavaScript problems and user experience)

Due to the fast feedback from Production the Dev Team immediately fixed that regression – bringing the system back to where they wanted it to be in the first place

Here is why our customers choose Dynatrace as a “DevOps Enabler”

I travel a lot and I learned my lessons the hard way when interacting with people from different cultures and nobody told me how to correctly act or react ….

But – communication is not only a challenge when we deal with totally different ppl

Here is the situation I ran into with Karolina

Why am I telling you about this? Because I think communication is one of the key cornerstones of good collaboration which is a key part of DevOps

These stats explain it to me on why face2face communication is key to successful collaboration

36.
“If you can impact the
[performance of the] code
before it is written, then and
only then, can you consider
your work to be performance
engineering. Otherwise, you
are just doing testing.”
- Jim Duggan, Gartner

57.
Andi: “Hey Karolina!! Quick Q!:
Who could help me with technical questions on AWS!!??”
Karolina: “Well … I think I can help you. What exactly do you need?”
2 Weeks Later in Boston – Face 2 Face
Karolina: “Good we finally meet face 2 face.
I really thought you were an a…..”
Andi: “??? WHAT ???”

59.
Why I choose email/chat?
What I loose?
I am in control!
I can edit!
I can end the conversation!
I can do it in a “boring” meeting!
Spontaneity
Connectedness / Relatedness
Unexpected problems
Unexpected solutions

60.
Pick up the Phone or Video Chat vs Email
Managers: Lead by Example, Make time for Talk!
Distributed Teams: bring them together from time 2 time
Design for conversations: Standups, Offsites,
Lunchroom, Open Workspace